On a recent Sunday, I took an elevator to the 11th floor of a high-rise in the Flatiron District to help video-game designer Jonathan Blow open a door. It was a big, sturdy thing made of wood and wrought iron—the kind you might find in a Scottish castle. Except it was missing a keyhole. “How do you think we get in?” Blow asked me, even though he already knew. There was a small digital panel with an inlaid “S” shape just visible to the right of the door. I pointed to it, trying to look unfazed. Blow clicked his mouse on the panel and, holding down the left button, began to trace the shape on the screen. The panel lit up, and the door clicked open.

Blow, a slim 42-year-old with a shaved head and glasses, has often spoken about the need for video games to leave the world of cheap thrills behind and grapple with more complex ideas. “It’s kind of like if every movie were a porn movie, most people wouldn’t see movies,” he told me. “The majority of games are basically porn—the onus is on us to make more things that are worth a reasonable person’s time.”

Blow’s landmark game, 2008’s Braid, was an example of that alternative—a game of puzzles, inflected with time travel, that took inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and contained references to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. It was also a rarity as an independently produced game: Blow made and published Braid himself, investing $200,000 of his money into its development. The game was an enormous success, making Blow a multimillionaire and allowing him to spend five years on his imminent follow-up: The Witness.

The Witness is set on a deserted island. It’s a single-player experience. There are no other characters, no scripted story line, and no boss to defeat. You simply wander around and solve puzzles of varying difficulty. It’s easy, at first: tracing simple shapes on panels or solving mazes, kind of like your first-grade math homework. But it gets harder. Puzzles begin to borrow from one another. There are elements of spatial reasoning and lateral thinking. In one puzzle, players are asked to visualize the position of a single apple hanging from the branches of a tree while standing in front of the tree, then to its left and right. There’s little need for trial and error: if you look carefully, each puzzle can be solved using knowledge gained from previous puzzles.

Blow says the majority of contemporary puzzle games don’t really challenge players, instead presenting them with “empty puzzles.”
“A lot of games today are only interested in making players feel smart, rather than have players actually be smart. A game that is just trying to make you feel smart all the time runs the danger of being like a Potemkin village: you may feel like you've had this sequence of cool experiences, but when you look at them more closely, you find that most of them are empty. I feel like ‘try to make players feel smart’ is a shallow motivation and I hold some kind of mild contempt for it. Rather than making some relatively surface experience where people feel smart—the implication being that they’re not actually that smart, we’re just helping them feel that way—game designers should believe that people are intrinsically smart and give them a chance to exercise those muscles and become better at it.”

It’s true that few puzzle games push boundaries when it comes to what actually constitutes a puzzle. Take the puzzle-game cliché: the locked door. If you happen upon a locked door in a game, chances are the key/code/password will be lying around somewhere close by—graffitied on the adjacent wall, perhaps, or scribbled on that painfully obvious piece of scrap paper sticking out of the trash can. Finding the code and opening the door doesn’t require any deductive reasoning or logic. It’s not really putting one’s “little gray cells” to use. Blow doesn’t like games that feed players’ egos with these continual yet ultimately insignificant triumphs. He believes a puzzle game can do much more.

Blow is preparing to release The Witness in the wake of last year’s “Gamergate” controversy—which began as a cry for more transparency in video-game reporting and devolved into serial harassment of female video-game journalists and developers. The entire affair greatly harmed the public perception of video games and the people who play them. Even at a time when games about cancer or immigration no longer feel like oddities alongside Call of Duty or Halo, people who had previously cared little about games were suddenly flooded with evidence of the video-game community as a poisonous and unwelcoming place. For someone already predisposed to think of video games as immature or free of artistic merit, Gamergate only served to strengthen that conviction.

More egregious is the impact on the next generation of game developers trying to drive the medium forward. If the video-game industry once hoped to find mainstream acceptance as a viable art form through games like Braid, Gamergate has made the task that much harder. For designers like Blow, the only way forward is to continue making thought-provoking work. There have been plenty of examples in the last few months alone, from Life is Strange, an episodic adventure game by Dontnod Entertainment about a teenage girl who returns to her hometown, to the upcoming Firewatch, about a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness whose only human contact is through a handheld radio.

A screenshot from The Witness.

Blow has been working on The Witness since finishing Braid in 2008. The game is set for release later this year on PC and PlayStation 4, with plans to bring the game to iOS and other platforms down the track. Five years may seem like a long time to spend working on one game, particularly since Blow hired a small team of artists and designers to help him out this time around. But The Witness is significantly more ambitious than Braid: Blow estimates the game will have between 20 and 40 hours of game play, compared to Braid’s four. (His recent tweet about a six-hour “speed run” through the game made headlines.)

As with Braid, there are larger ideas behind The Witness. The puzzles are not a means to an end; they hint at context and meaning, about the game, its characters, even its designer. “Works that we really value in the long term are the ones that aren't afraid of ambiguity,” Blow said. “They are the works that have an agenda beyond the short-term goal of providing short-term pleasure to an audience for a few minutes.”

The game asks players to think about the properties of everyday objects—a door, a table, or a tree—in a three-dimensional world virtual environment. This may sound easy, but it took me a good 10 minutes to work out the position of an apple as seen by someone standing north of the tree versus someone standing southeast of the tree. This time, Blow has created a game whose aim is to explore that miniature epiphany we feel when we solve puzzles, specifically the transition between confusion and dawning of realization.

“It's about being in a world and looking around and wondering what that world is, and why we are there, and how the things that we perceive to happen can possibly be happening.”